How Your Music Band Can Rock Pinterest

Musicians, by necessity, need to be good at self-promotion. There are just so many bands in the world that you need to take charge of your own marketing and ensure you get noticed. Thankfully, the Internet is here to help you promote yourself easily and the latest shiny tool for you to get acquainted with is Pinterest. Musicians can really make use of Pinterest, so we’ll try to help you do a good job of it by giving you a few pointers on how to use Pinterest.

Pinterest is essentially a digital scrapbook for photos and video. It’s a bright, visually pleasing and creative place to hang out online, so it’s ideal for musicians to feature their art. Lots of people use Pinterest for motivation and inspiration. All you need to do is to look at it the right way and set up a few things to get yourself started. Then it will all just come naturally.

Starting Your Band’s Pinterest Profile

On Pinterest, it’s possible for entities like businesses and bands to have a profile. However, only personal Facebook profiles can be linked. Request your invite to Pinterest and instead link your band’s Twitter account to Pinterest in order to get yourself going. You can later link to your band’s Facebook page from the URL field if you like.

Brand Your Band’s Pinterest Profile

Set up your band’s Pinterest profile with the same care you take for your website and other band profiles. Link to your band’s website and feature an awesome profile image. Fill out the bio with keywords about your band so that people can find you. Make sure you revisit your profile when you’ve set up boards and been pinning for a while in order to choose board covers and rearrange your boards.

Get Personal Profiles For Band Members

Most of the time, you’ll be logged into Pinterest as yourself just doing your own thing. The easiest way to maintain a band profile is for all band members to have personal profiles and to be contributors to your band’s Pinterest boards. So, make sure all your band members have personal profiles before you continue.

Set Up Your Band’s Boards

While logged in as your band, you’ll need to set up some group Pinterest boards which you will then share with your band members. Your band members will receive invites to contribute which they can accept. These boards will then be featured on both the Band’s page and on the profiles of your individual members.

Everyone can contribute to the content as they go about their normal business. Using tools like Pinterest’s “Pin It” button, each member can pin interesting things to either their personal profile or the band’s boards. This also means each individual member is responsible for finding their own interesting Pinners to follow.

What Should The Boards Be?

Some businesses have done really well by asking their fans what shorts of Pinterest boards they should have. You could try this with your fans or just start with a few good ideas and go from there. Try to use your band’s name in your board names so that your band members remember that it’s the band’s board and fans remember what they’re seeing. Also, remember that you don’t always want to just pin your own stuff. Create your boards specifically to share things your band loves.

Cause AwesomeBand – If your band sings about injustice in the world, share more about it in a dedicated board.

AwesomeBand Playlists – Get your band and fans to make playlists in music sharing sites like Spotify, Last.fm, Youtube and sharemyplaylists.com which feature your band alongside your favourite artists. Pin the best photo or video using the “Pin It” bookmarklet on the playlist page, ensuring it links back to the playlist. Your fans will love it!

AwesomeBand Tracks – You need somewhere to toot your own horn! Put up your own videos on Youtube or Vimeo and pin them.

Pics of AwesomeBand – Put up your own photos and pin them, plus encourage your fans to pin photos they’ve taken of you and @you so you notice them and pin them here.

AwesomeBand Gear – Pin instruments and music gear you love or have.

Venues AwesomeBand Loves – Make a wishlist of the venues you’d love to play in.

AwesomeBand Loves – Just a random board for anything else your members want to share.

AwesomeBand Gigs With – Promote the bands you gig with and help raise the profile of your favourite local artists.

Music Quotes – Random music-related quotes.

Cross-Pollinate

Don’t forget to occasionally promote one of your band’s Pinterest boards on your Facebook page, to pin a Flickr album of your band’s last gig or to pin a blog post with a poster for your next gig. Keep it interesting and make sure you’re always giving your fans something new to explore. Remember that good pins will link to the source, so you can easily promote your music and pictures from elsewhere. It’s good for your SEO, too!

Teach Your Band & Fans How To Pin

If you can teach your fans how to pin photos and videos taken at your gigs then you’ll have half of your work done for you. Also teach them how to @you the pins of your band (or other things your band will love) to get your attention. It’s easy – just type @ and follow with the name of the person you’re following that you want to mention. If you’re really good, take photos of the crowd at your gigs and @fans with photos they’re in. Don’t forget to tag your pins!

Ensure Your Band’s Website Is Pinterest-Ready

Make sure your band’s website and other profiles have a “Follow Me On Pinterest” button and easy ways for your fans to pin videos and pictures you upload. Check out Pinterest’s goodies to get yourself started.

Pinterest For Small Business and Brands

You might have noticed that small businesses and brands could easily use this same Pinterest information for their own purposes. By setting the business page up like this, you evoke the best possible mix of professional profile and personal touch as users can see the real people behind the post while following the business they love.

Do you use Pinterest for your Band? What boards do you have? What other tips could you give readers? Tell us in the comments!

Angela Alcorn

Daver

May 30, 2012

Nice article and makes perfect sense to me,

However, your contact gmail address appears disabled (I have an “offline” question for you). Here is the “Returned mail” message: “reason: 550 5.2.1 The email account that you tried to reach is disabled.”

Angela Alcorn

May 31, 2012

Thanks. Apparently I didn’t log in directly for too long. Waiting to get it re-enabled now. *sigh*

Although, I can’t imagine what you might ask me privately (that I would answer) that you couldn’t ask here. Ask away..

Daver

May 31, 2012

Fair enough – so, here is my question:

Interested in your sense as to when an article might make sense for a (US based) startup that creates youTube videos from images for bands, photographers, pinterest and other users – examples here: